Tom Ward, a 19-year-old Hull University student, took part in an initiation ceremony for new rugby team recruits. The pub crawl, known as the Beverley Road Run, was simple, yet unforgiving.

Every 10 minutes teams of students set off for a pub. They had five minutes to down pints and spirits before running to the next pub. The aim was to stay ahead of the next team.

In the ceremony last October, Ward, a second-year student in criminology and psychology, consumed at least 12 pints and up to six shots - at least 30 units of alcohol in three hours. After arriving back at his shared student house he fell and was discovered lifeless at the foot of the stairs. Attempts to revive him failed. A coroner at Hull earlier this month ruled that Ward had died of "positional asphyxia caused by alcohol intoxication".

Yet his death has seemingly done little to curb the students' appetite to carry on with the tradition again this year. "We have no control over students once they have left the union premises. They are all over 18 and adults," says Shona Lloyd, president of Hull University Student Union. "Following the accident we led a 'Mind Your Mates' campaign, to encourage them to look after friends on nights out. The dangers of excessive drinking in a short space of time will be emphasised again when our next intake of students starts in September."

Ward is not the first student to die in such circumstances. Alex Doji, 18, a rookie in the Staffordshire University rugby team, died in 2003 after choking on his own vomit after a ceremony in which he had to pick deflated balloons with his teeth from a tub of chilli, dog food and pig offal.

The nature of his death and the ensuing publicity resulted in the university banning initiations, on or off campus. Tough disciplinary procedures were introduced to clamp down on what the university condemned as a "dangerous and degrading exercise".

Despite their good intentions, the university's boat club later posted pictures of one of their ceremonies on the student union website. Intoxicated club members are photographed pouring beer and spirits down huge funnels into the mouths of their newest team mates.

When alerted to the pictures by Education Guardian, Staffordshire pulled them from the website and pledged to hold an inquiry into how they appeared.

The rules governing the initiation ceremony are clear: what happens behind closed doors stays there. The sequence of events in the build-up to Doji's death had been made public only at his inquest. As one official at another university admitted: "Often we don't know what's going on. We have to trust the teams to act appropriately."

Some campaigns appear to have worked. Southampton University introduced an initiation ban after one of its students, who had taken part in a rugby ceremony, overturned his car and was nearly killed. Tom Kenward, the university's vice-president for student activities, says the ban was unpopular at first. "There was a lot of opposition. But the drinking culture was putting off some elite athletes from taking part and we had to act."In a survey of students at Southampton commissioned by the university, 22% reported acts of physical abuse during initiations and a further 14% encountered sexual abuse. Some 80% of those questioned said that they weren't able to opt out of the ceremony. The report concluded: "Those conducting the ceremonies often resort to verbal or physical abuse to humiliate an initiate in order to ensure recognition of the hierarchal structure." A small but worrying minority - 12% - said the ceremonies "eliminated the weak".

"One of the strongest arguments against sporting initiation ceremonies is that the behaviour of a minority of students deters a significant number of others from getting involved in sport on campus," says Bill Wakeham, vice-chancellor of Southampton. "The statistics we now have show that the removal of such ceremonies has encouraged many more students to enjoy the benefits of sport."

The number of students participating in sport at the university has gone up by 27% - and is continuing to rise. Both the British Universities Sports Association (Busa) and the National Union of Students support Southampton's stance and have urged other universities to adopt the regulations. They include a recommendation that any team found in breach of the policy be fined £500 and banned from Busa competitions for one year.

It's proved a relatively futile exercise so far. Such is the resourcefulness of students that a ban merely drives ceremonies further underground, or into pubs and bars miles from campus. "Of course, some of the teams still do initiations and some even go to the Isle of Wight to do them. It is difficult to stop completely, but we are sending out a message," says Kenward.

At Birmingham University, some students claim to be proud to do their initiation, describing it as a "rite of passage" and essential for team morale. "There is brilliant camaraderie that goes with doing it," one third-year rugby player says. "I didn't feel threatened, but do know of people who haven't joined because they knew about what happened."

Birmingham University said they took breaches of their code of conduct "extremely seriously" and had an "established disciplinary procedure" in place. Sanctions included suspension from the athletic union, the spokesman added.

At Westminster University, the student magazine, the Smoke, makes no bones about the true nature of the initiation ceremony. It describes it as a "ceremony where new players prove their worth and dedication by consuming copious amounts of alcohol through various orifices".

Freshers should "show respect to senior players" and undertake any forfeit assigned to them "no matter how demeaning or embarrassing".

Initiation ceremonies are by no means the exclusive preserve of sports teams. Bristol University boasts the infamous "treasure hunt" - an initiation for first-year vets that includes drinking pints of maggots and crawling through muddy streams. A former student says: "I always remember some of the students coming back in tears after the treasure hunt. One even wanted to leave uni because she was so distressed by what she had to do."

Bristol University has banned this year's event because of what it described as the "excessive drinking and safety risks". But the prospect of cancelling the age-old tradition is, students argue, completely out of the question. This October's event is already being planned.